Shock new Chinese entry to Bitcoin mining pool

A Chinese mining group has entered the Bitcoin mining pool in seismic fashion amassing 5.15% of the total Bitcoin (BTC) hash rate in just three weeks.

Called Lubian, the mining company processed its first block on April 24th after it found block #627,441, something picked up on by BlockBeats. Now, according to data from btc.com, the company is the sixth-largest mining pool holding a 6.30 EH/s hash rate.

Blockbeats shows Lubian’s entry alongside this graph

Who is Lubian?

Quite who is behind the mining pool and where it came from is up in the air. Most major mining pools, like Bitmain and F2Pool, have visible leadership. However, its website offers little as to the identities of the operators only saying that they are “the safest high yielding mining pool in the world.”

Other clues as to the identity of Lubian show their clear Chinese origin. Lubian means “roadside” in Mandarin and they use an URL linked to Alibaba’s cloud service.

Primitive Ventures’ founding partner and Twitter commentator, Dovey Wan had one theory that the pool was private and has just decided to make themselves public. “It must be a private pool before now reveals itself to be public as hashrate didn’t see a pop,” she tweeted.

Perhaps the team behind Lubian were emboldened by recent events in Sichuan, China. The province which is famous for its large amount of miners, revealed a document in support of the industry last month. Bitcoin miners were encouraged to make use of their hydropower stations and provided some regulatory measures, a marked change for an industry on the brink of illegality in April 2019.

Another important point well raised by Wan was the timing of the entry. As many of you will know, Bitcoin experienced a halving on the 11th of May, something which was meant to put off a lot of miners in the industry.

Valarhash, the owners of Bytepool and 1THash abandoned their Bitcoin mining ventures to focus on Altcoins and many more exits are expected with mining rewards also being slashed from 12.5 BTC to 6.25 BTC.

With this in mind, Wan contended that, “Whoever owns the pool, must have owns the bootstrapping hashrate to start with as other pools didn’t see a major drop off.”

Clearly, there is a new player in town within the mining industry and Lubian is a name to look out for in the future.